The racially diverse affective expression (RADIATE) face stimulus set

Abstract

Faces are often used in psychological and neuroimaging research to assess perceptual and emotional processes. Most available stimulus sets, however, represent minimal diversity in both race and ethnicity, which may confound understanding of these processes in diverse/racially heterogeneous samples. Having a diverse stimulus set of faces and emotional expressions could mitigate these biases and may also be useful in research that specifically examines the effects of race and ethnicity on perceptual, emotional and social processes. The racially diverse affective expression (RADIATE) face stimulus set is designed to provide an open-access set of 1,721 facial expressions of Black, White, Hispanic and Asian adult models. Moreover, the diversity of this stimulus set reflects census data showing a change in demographics in the United States from a white majority to a nonwhite majority by 2020. Psychometric results are provided describing the initial validity and reliability of the stimuli based on judgments of the emotional expressions.

The Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study: Imaging acquisition across 21 sites

“…Finally, this task directly builds upon data collected as part of the lifespan pilot of the Human Connectome Project ( Barch et al, 2013 ). The stimuli, unlike the traditional or HCP versions of the n-back task, include a set of happy, fearful and neutral facial expressions ( Conley et al, 2017 ; Tottenham et al, 2009 ). Cognitive processing of these stimuli taps fronto-amygdala circuitry and functions involved in emotion reactivity and regulation ( Hare et al, 2008 ; Gee et al, 2013 ), and taps ventral fronto-striatal circuitry implicated in reward ( Somerville et al, 2011 ), providing evidence of its validity as a measure of emotion reactivity.…”

“…The use of place stimuli as a non-emotional and non-social set of stimuli has been shown to produce highly reliable patterns of brain activity across subjects and time ( Peelen and Downing, 2005 ). The facial stimuli are drawn from the NimStim emotional stimulus set ( Tottenham et al, 2009 ) and the Racially Diverse Affective Expressions (RADIATE) set of stimuli ( Conley et al, 2017 ) to adequately address the diversity among ABCD participants. The place stimuli are drawn from previous visual perception studies ( Kanwisher, 2001 ; O'Craven and Kanwisher, 2000 ; Park and Chun, 2009 ).…”

The Complex Emotion Expression Database: A validated stimulus set of trained actors

“…These databases largely include static photographs and vary by age of the expresser to include infants, children, adolescents, or adults [17,18,19,20]. Most of the databases include both male and female expressers and some have racial/ethnic diversity (e.g., [21,22,23]). In contrast, there are many fewer stimulus database options for researchers interested in investigating the perception and/or recognition of complex expressions.…”

Behavioral and neural signatures of working memory in childhood

“…The in-scanner emotional n-back (EN-back) task engages processes related to memory and emotion regulation (54,94). During the task, children perform 0-back (low memory load) and 2-back (high memory load) task blocks with four types of stimuli: happy, fearful, and neutral face photographs (95,96) and place photographs. Data are collected during two approximately 5min functional MRI runs each with four 0-back and 2-back blocks each.…”